Of course, I might be taking it personally since my blog is called Cheap Like Me. I suppose by your definition, it’s about frugality, because my goal is to help people learn how to be cheap — but cheap with intention, using money to live by their values and in the style they want.

But I notice that alongside the same post where you criticize cheapness, you advertise your book … 365 Ways to Live Cheap (not frugally)!

Maybe we should drop the semantics and just admit that cheap sounds like more fun — and hopefully that will be a lasting trend.

But the key to recent spending was access to credit. Lots of people who have lost jobs (or fear the loss of) or who have a down portfolio are being frugal. But once those fears go away and their portfolios are doing a little better they’ll spend more again. But those who relied on credit for spending (and it was a good number of people) will not recover so quickly. They’ll only be able to spend what they have, not what their credit card allows.

In China there has been thousands-of-years-old culture of frugality and sensible spending. However, now that their economy is growing rapidly in the 21st century, there is a fast-growing group of consumers that spend their new wealth frivolously.

It’s still a relatively small group (well, relative to a total of over 1 billion) that is mostly concentrated in the cities, but it became evident in the rise in cars vs. bicyles in the cities, growing personal debt, the rise in popularity of high fashion and fancy restaurants, and other signs of conspicuous consumption.

The consumerism also happened in India when their economy took off in the eighties and nineties and again, was more concentrated in the cities.

So it might not be a Western cultural phenomenon, but a real human trait to indulge onself in one’s perceived luxuries, even if it means risking bankrupcy in the future. For a lot of people, it took a drastic reduction in income to bring them back to frugal habits. But when the money started rolling in, even after thousands of years of poverty, the frugal habits are quickly forgotten by all but a fraction of people.

One example: my best friend, a tried-and-true mega-consumer fast-food-eater as long as I knew her (20 years and counting), made big bucks in D.C. as a software engineer, married, sold her overpriced townhouse, bought an old suburban house in upstate NY, started some home-based businesses, and raises her 2 kids, 2 cows, and a rotating number of chickens (some lay eggs, most they eat) – all of them eating organic pesticide-free food.

Ok, so she’s a bit extreme, but the small steps she took were not, they were little ones – and Michael Pollan’s books on food in the U.S. certainly fed into their decisions big-time!

I guess my feeling is that there is a genuine ground-swell within a sub-section of our nation (I can’t speak beyond the U.S.) that will hold onto the frugality, not just for its own sake but because it has other healthy benefits for our bodies and environment.

In an attempt to save money now, people in the normal group may be tending toward frugal, eating out less, and cooking more from scratch. As this finds its way into society, a new level of normal could be defined, so that any kind of eating out is extravagant, and cooking at home is normal. To be frugal in this category now, you would have to do some other technique, like bulk cooking to avoid running the oven as much, etc.

So I think that frugal as a buzz-word might pass, but some of the habits of frugal people might move over into the realm of normal.

I think this trend is permanent, though the pop-culture thing will fall back some. The underlying problems in wages, benefits, and inequality aren’t going to get better anytime soon – they’re not new, they were just driving debt instead of frugality before the bubble crashed.

Even if people who are frugal now go back to their freespending ways, they’ll have the knowledge they gained to fall back on if they need it again.

I take frugality as a serious, but not all-encompassing idea. My goal is not NOT waste money. Not on every decision, not as a way of life, but as a worthwhile goal – when feasible.

That’s my style. Certainly not recommending it for anyone else.

Sometimes if we can just change the way we view many of the things in our world we begin to learn that it’s an opportunity to learn and better ourselves rather than a burden…

-Andy

Individually I think it’s very possible for people to make these changes, but as a cohort there are too many social and other pressures pushing the other way. Hopefully people will see the disconnect between popular culture and their own lives, and make up their own mind.